Florence Pushes Away From Carolinas but Rivers Keep Rising

WILMINGTON, N.C. — The remnants of Hurricane Florence threatened more destruction on Tuesday as swollen rivers pushed higher in the Carolinas and flash flood advisories were issued for cities along the storm’s northeast trajectory, including Washington, New York and Boston.

Across the Carolinas, residents struggled with the aftermath of a storm that drenched the region with record rainfall, damaged tens of thousands of homes and delivered floodwaters that may not recede for days.

In Wilmington, one of North Carolina’s most populous cities, residents lined up by the hundreds Tuesday for free food, water and tarps as the city had been effectively cut off by floodwaters. The authorities in North and South Carolina rescued more people by air and water. Curfews were in effect, and thousands of people remained out of their homes with no certainty of when they would be able to return.

“These next 48 hours are going to be critical, to make sure that as these rivers rise we continue to focus on saving lives,” Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina said Tuesday.

Granite-colored clouds largely gave way to blue skies on Monday, and zipping winds and clacking rains were replaced by a different soundtrack: the helicopters that roared and hovered above Wilmington; leaf-blowers and chain saws that cleaned up Charlotte; and the soft swirl of the still-rising Cape Fear River that menaced Fayetteville as it flowed under the Person Street Bridge.

The storm’s slow-motion siege was blamed for at least 34 deaths, and the authorities fear additional fatalities as floodwaters fill more streets and homes. The sunshine, they warned, did not signal an end to the danger, and counties in the Pee Dee region in northeast South Carolina braced for water racing toward them.

“We encourage people to not cross any bodies of water because that is what’s getting people injured and killed,” said Scott Dean, who oversees a search-and-rescue task force from Miami that was conducting a reconnaissance mission in Marion County, S.C., ahead of expected flooding.

Already, Mr. Dean’s federally deployed team had been busy, spotting an older man who could not swim in Latta, S.C., around sunrise on Monday. The man in a striped shirt stood on the roof of his car, clutching a tree branch as the water rushed at his feet.

Mr. Dean’s squadron sent in a boat, and the team threw a life jacket around the man just as the water started to cover the roof.

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Wilmington, N.C., took a direct hit from the storm, and rapidly rising waters left it virtually cut off. We spoke with one resident whose life has been upended.

“He was in disbelief about what was going on,” Mr. Dean said, adding that the man was not calling for help when they spotted him despite his imminent danger.

The rescue in Latta — and countless others by government rescue teams and volunteer forces — perhaps spared an addition to the death toll. At least 26 people have been killed in North Carolina, including a 1-year-old boy, Kaiden Lee Welch, who was pulled by the waters from his mother’s arms on a flooded highway near Charlotte on Sunday night.

The authorities recovered his body, trapped between a car and a tree, on Monday morning.

Two deaths were linked to the storm in Virginia, including an employee who was killed when a tornado brought down the roof at a flooring company’s warehouse in Midlothian, about 12 miles west of Richmond, the authorities said. On Tuesday, a man died in Louisa County when his pickup truck was submerged in rushing water.

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Power trucks drove along a flooded Highway 117 in Wilmington, N.C.CreditEric Thayer for The New York Times

As more risks loomed, officials scrambled to cope with the consequences of a storm that meandered over the region and set off days of peril in county after county.

Wilmington, a city of about 119,000 residents, faced some of North Carolina’s most severe troubles. The routes connecting the city inland were blocked by floodwaters and debris. The airport and shipping port were also closed.

Two helicopter flights were used to bring in medical supplies; food and water came in on 20 trucks from Fort Bragg.

Residents were only beginning to process days of trauma and emotions. Sodden and disheveled, Brian Scandalito, 55, emerged Monday from the backyard storage shed in Wilmington where he said he had ridden out the storm on Thursday night and into Friday. He had moved into the 10-by-10 building hours before the storm after a maintenance man evicted him from his tent behind a nearby strip mall.

He survived on a packaged luncheon ham and a bag of tortillas. He filled a bottle with tap water from a gas station. By late Monday morning, he was walking down a partly flooded highway, past fallen pine trees, hoping to catch a ride to a shelter. He was wary of leaving the shed, and he carried his only possession: a transmitter radio that blared storm bulletins.

“I think I’d like to move to Montana,” he said.

Troubles abounded beyond the city limits, too.

Mayor Daniel Hilburn of Lake Waccamaw, a town of about 1,500 people west of Wilmington, was urgently seeking air-conditioners for a nursing home with 101 residents and an assisted living facility with 65 residents. With the rain lifting, he said, the weather was “getting hot.”

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Storm damage in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday, after the remnants of Hurricane Florence moved through the region.CreditAlyssa Schukar for The New York Times

“It’s a steam bath,” he said.

He said the facilities, which have generators, would need to be evacuated if the air-conditioners did not arrive soon.

And regulators said that a nuclear power plant 30 miles south of Wilmington had become temporarily inaccessible because of flooding, prompting the plant’s operator, Duke Energy, to declare an “unusual event,” the lowest-level emergency tracked by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (The authorities said there were no immediate safety concerns at the plant’s two reactors, which Duke shut down ahead of the storm, and no flooding had been reported at the site itself.)

In some parts of the Wilmington area, life appeared oddly ordinary. A Burger King restaurant was open in Monkey Junction, an unincorporated part of New Hanover County, and Tony Harker idled in a pickup truck, having been lured by the smell of fast food as he was heading to repair his mother-in-law’s plumbing.

In Spring Lake, a small town just to the northwest of Fayetteville, nearly 20 people had to be rescued on Monday, most from an apartment complex that had suddenly been marooned by a record-breaking flood of the Little River.

In Lumberton, south of Fayetteville, more rescues were reported along the rising Lumber River. Ponds and creeks that had been harmless after Hurricane Matthew in 2016 were filling up subdivisions and rendering some small communities as islands.

Farther down in Dillon, S.C., dozens of people had to be rescued overnight as waters rose in small towns and rural areas. “There were some high water rescues and there’re going to be some more probably,” said the Rev. Ron Taylor, a pastor in Dillon. “Lot of displaced people right now.”

And in Fayetteville, N.C., the seat of a county where thousands of residents were without electricity, people crowded into the open restaurants, sat at open-air cafes and gathered on a bridge, watching the Cape Fear climb.

At its highest projected level, it would run out of its banks and possibly damage hundreds of homes and businesses. It could top out around 58 feet, the same height it reached after Hurricane Matthew, and stay mostly within its banks.

“Now that the storm is gone and the sun is out, some people don’t really understand the impact of the floodwaters,” said the mayor, Mitch Colvin. “That’s the dangerous part.”

There was no way to know except to wait. The river was expected to crest early Wednesday.

“I’ve spent all my life in Fayetteville,” said Dedric Higginbottom, 45, who was among the river watchers on the Person Street Bridge. “This is only the second time I’ve seen it this high.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Rivers Keep Rising and More Deaths Are Feared as Storm Pushes Away. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe